Americans’ life expectancy is expected to stall by 2050 because of increasing obesity and drug use, researchers said this week.
Right now, the country is on an upward trajectory, but improvements are expected to slow. In 2022, life expectancy at birth was 77.5 years in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s up from 76.4 years in 2021.
By 2035, life expectancy will increase to 79.9 years and by 80.4 years in 2050 for men and women. However, despite progress made over the past three decades, the country will drop from 80th place in life expectancy to 108th by that year, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation cautioned.
“In spite of modest increases in life expectancy overall, our models forecast health improvements slowing down due to rising rates of obesity, which is a serious risk factor to many chronic diseases and forecasted to leap to levels never before seen,” Christopher Murray, the institute’s director, said in a statement. “The rise in obesity and overweight rates in the U.S., with [the institute] forecasting over 260 million people affected by 2050, signals a public health crisis of unimaginable scale.”
Murray is the co-senior author of a study with these findings published on Thursday in the journal The Lancet.
The researchers found that women’s health in the U.S. is falling behind other countries faster than men’s, with life expectancy declining in 20 states by 2050. This is because there are major improvements for men, while there are slow or no changes in female life expectancy.
The authors noted that a slight increase in life expectancy in 2050 would be due to a decline in mortality rates, including dropping rates of deaths from heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Notably, the death rate from drug use orders was projected to climb another 34 percent from 2022 to 2050: marking the highest drug use-related mortality in the world.
“The opioid epidemic is far from over, and greater effectiveness and continued expansion of programs to prevent and treat drug use are still needed,” said lead author Ali Mokdad.
The institute said that if major risk factors such as obesity, high blood sugar and high blood pressure were eliminated in this timeframe, more than 12 million deaths could be averted. If smoking is reduced, the U.S. could have more than 2 million fewer deaths, and reducing high body mass index levels and high blood sugar levels during the same three decades could prevent 1.4 million people from dying.
“The rapid decline of the U.S. in global rankings from 2022 to 2050 rings the alarm for immediate action. The U.S. must change course and find new and better health strategies and policies that slow down the decline in future health outcomes,” co-senior author Dr. Stein Emil Vollset said.
